Mark Padmore / Kristian Bezuidenhout SCHUBERT Winterreise

Only a few months after Florian Boesch’s second recording of Schubert’s great wintry song-cycle (Hyperion, A/17), here’s a second bite at the bitter cherry from another singer, albeit a very different one. With Mark Padmore at least there’s been a longer intervening period: it’s nine years since the release of his previous Winterreise, a 2010 Gramophone Award-winner, also on Harmonia Mundi. And there’s a major difference here, too, in that not only is Paul Lewis replaced by Kristian Bezuidenhout but a modern concert grand is switched for a Graf fortepiano.

As with the earlier recording, there’s a wealth of interest to be found at the keyboard. Here the instrument itself is beautifully mellow, with an especially tender con sordini sound as well as some brightness in the tone when required – not often, admittedly, in this most subdued of cycles. I love the hazy twang Bezuidenhout produces at the start of ‘Der Lindenbaum’, the wild clanging of the ‘Wetterfahne’ and the real sense he gives in ‘Die Krähe’ of the bird swirling ominously about. The melody of ‘Frühlingstraum’ is imbued with so much hope, that of ‘Der Leiermann’ with so little, its opening drone, played much as Lewis plays it, resembling less notes than just a pained, numb sound.

Bezuidenhout spreads his chords occasionally and offers a light sprinkling of ornaments, as does Padmore. And in the later stages of the cycle, in particular, the tenor offers singing of remarkable patience, control and concentration (listen to how he builds up ‘Das Wirtshaus’). The final songs are moving, and Padmore’s intelligence and seriousness are never in doubt, his interpretation always probing.

One notices, however, that the voice has lost some juice: he struggles to offer warmth to counter the blanched tone he employs elsewhere, while the lower register is underpowered. His German, too, is strangely affected, with vowels self-consciously opened up and consonants over-deliberate. The earlier recording, five minutes slower, features many of the same interpretative touches and characteristics, but they are more worrying here, less convincing. Matters are not helped, either, by engineering that places the voice in a strange quasi-ecclesiastical halo.

Padmore’s fans will no doubt snap his new recording up, but I’d otherwise recommend sticking with the earlier one, featuring Lewis’s warm, deeply human contribution at the keyboard. And if fortepiano’s what you need, head to Christoph Prégardien and Andreas Staier for something altogether more grounded, satisfying and idiomatic. (Hugo Shirley / Gramophone)